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150 min read · 30,191 words- 0:00 – 0:59
Colossal Biosciences: What a de-extinction company actually does
- BLBen Lamm
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- NANarrator
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) All right, we're up. What's up, Ben?
- BLBen Lamm
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
- JRJoe Rogan
My pleasure. Very nice to meet you, man. So, uh, why don't you, instead of me ex- why don't you explain to people what you do?
- BLBen Lamm
So, I'm, uh, the CEO and co-founder of a company called Colossal Biosciences. We're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And-
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... uh, that is a wild thing. I mean, this is, uh, essentially, um, literally wild. This is essentially real life Jurassic Park.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, we get to Jurassic Park c- occasionally. Like, believe it or not, we get to that.
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs) Of course. I mean-
- BLBen Lamm
I gotta drop my hydrogen tablet in there, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, you do those? The Gary Brecka ones, right?
- BLBen Lamm
Oh, yeah. I'm all in.
- JRJoe Rogan
Those are great.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I love those. Um-
- BLBen Lamm
I just didn't want you to think it was, we were going a different direction-
- JRJoe Rogan
How did you get started even thinking about doing something like this?
- 0:59 – 3:40
How Ben met George Church and why mammoths became the first target
- BLBen Lamm
So, I kind of fell into it. I didn't plan, I didn't wake up and say, "I saw Jurassic Park, I'm super stoked, I love animals, I wanna go work on this." Um, I'm just a weirdly curious person. So, there's this guy named George Church, and if you don't know George, you should look him up. He's the father of synthetic biology. He's at Harvard University. He's f- six foot seven with narcolepsy. He's just the best, right? So, if you've ever had him on, he may fall asleep during the podcast, but he's just, he's the absolute best. He's a genius. And I thought, uh, my background's in software and just building teams of people that are smarter than me, right? And so, I, I was interested in synthetic biology, this idea that we could engineer life, and that we could use AI and compute to make it even better. Like, how do we do directed evolution and how, and how that can apply to, like, crops and animals and all kinds of stuff. So, I get on the phone with George, and I ask him my questions. He answers them in, like, six seconds 'cause he's a genius. And then I start asking about all the other weird stuff that's coming out of his lab. In that process, he's like, "You know, I've also been working on mammoths and other things." I was like, "Wait, wait, what?" And I was like, "If you had one project, w- what, is it this mammoth project?" And then he went down this whole path about how he'd bring back mammoths, reintroduce them in the Arctic, help the ecosystem, use those technologies for conservation, use those technologies for human healthcare. And I kind of thought it was a fucking joke. I literally thought that, like, the smartest man I've ever met and been on the phone with was a joke. Well, then I stayed up all night just googling George, and there was this weird mammoth through line. Whether it was in 60 Minutes or, you know, Stephen Colbert, or whatever he was in, there was this weird mammoth through line, where he was just obsessed with these mammoths. And everyone kind of wanted him to do this. So, I called him back the next day. Seven days later, I'm in his lab and we were off to the races on, okay, we're gonna try to go build a company to bring back extinct species.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, how do you decide what to start with?
- BLBen Lamm
So, we started with the mammoth first, right, 'cause George, you know, uh, had been working on it for eight years. We needed his core technologies. Uh, we thought that there was a huge application to elephant conservation. There was some ecological modeling that had been done that shows that ma- the reintroduction of mammoths back into the wild, uh, could actually have a net benefit to the ecosystem. Um, and so that was an easy place to start. After we launched, the company went crazy viral. And all these other folks from de-extinction research started calling us, like folks from, like, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, which looks like a mythical creature, it's awesome.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
Um, the, uh, Beth Shapiro with the dodo, everyone just started calling us and then we just started expanding, you know, our, our entire set.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, how does one do this? So like, let's, uh, before we get to what you showed me earlier, which is fucking amazing-
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... before that, how does one do this? Like, (clears throat) w- from what I understand, you have to take the gene of an Indian elephant, which is the closest thing to a mammoth.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, let me walk through the whole process.
- JRJoe Rogan
Please, yeah.
- 3:40 – 4:36
The mammoth workflow: ancient DNA recovery, AI assembly, and reference genomes
- BLBen Lamm
So, first you have to find ancient DNA, which is pretty shitty on a good day. So, the minute we take DNA out of our bodies or out of anything, it starts to degrade at an insanely rapid rate. So, we definitely need, uh, to find a lot of samples. So, we actually have about 109 mammoth samples ranging from 3,000 years old to 1.2 million years old, which is awesome.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BLBen Lamm
But it's also fragmented. It's like, it's like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you don't know what the box is and someone's stolen part of the puzzle. And then, oh, by the way, people have taken other puzzle pieces and put them in there. So, there's all kinds of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
... problems with that. So, this is really an AI and compute problem. It's not as much a human problem. So, you have to get a lot of samples first, and then you have to start mapping them to their closest living relative. And genotyping allows us to understand that that's Asian elephants, right? So, Asian elephants are 99.6% the same as mammoths.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
They're actually closer related to mammoths than they are to African elephants.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- 4:36 – 6:27
Mammoths weren’t that long ago: extinction timing and Wrangel Island theories
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, which always blows people's mind. That, and the fact that mammoths were alive when we were building the pyramids, or aliens or whoever was building the pyramids.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
Like, like literally, like, humans were building the pyramids while mammoths existed. And sometimes that blows people's mind 'cause they always think of them as in this, like, weird, like, uh, prehistoric, like, 65 million years old dinosaur, dinosaur.
- JRJoe Rogan
When, when did they go extinct?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, so the last one went extinct about 4,000 years ago-
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BLBen Lamm
... uh, on Wrangel Island. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BLBen Lamm
So, they've been around a while, they were around for a long time.
- JRJoe Rogan
4,000 years ago.
- BLBen Lamm
I know, they weren't, I mean, now, they appeared about two and a half million, um, years ago, as far as we understand. And, uh, they were mostly a Pleistocene species. But as we moved into the Holocene and kind of the period that we're in right now, they existed. They existed all the way up until they had this, like, small genetic bottleneck on Wrangel Island.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. And where is Wrangel Island?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, it's northeast of Siberia.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa. And they just, was it a small island, they just ran out of resources there? Like, what happened?
- BLBen Lamm
Well, there's a couple different theories, right? One of the theories, uh, with Wrangel Island is that they actually, uh, uh, there's lots of inbreeding. So, there's lots of, like, genetic bottleneck which happened 'cause there's not a different species there.
- JRJoe Rogan
How large is Wrangel Island?
- BLBen Lamm
I'm not quite sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can you give me a photo again, Jamie?Okay.
- BLBen Lamm
And so essentially though, um, Wrangel Island and then, um, uh, there's another island called St. Paul Island, which is also between Alaska and, and the United, and, uh, Russia, also is where they were. Those are kind of the last two places that, that we know mammoths existed today.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they died out 4,000 years ago.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it's fairly small.
- BLBen Lamm
And now, now some actually... There is actually a, a another working hypothesis that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh yeah, it's really small.
- BLBen Lamm
... they actually ran out of water, they ran out of access to fresh water on the island.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, wow.
- BLBen Lamm
So some combination of genetic bottleneck and that occurred.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. 4,000 years is so recent.
- BLBen Lamm
I know, it's, it's crazy recent, right?
- 6:27 – 9:51
Elephants up close: behavior, intelligence, and ethical discomfort with riding them
- JRJoe Rogan
Jamie, can you please pull up a photo of an Asian elephant, uh, versus a African elephant?
- BLBen Lamm
And they're actually, mammoths, because there's a l- you know... Mammoths themselves, yeah. Mammoths themselves are close related to the Asian elephant. They have that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is on the left?
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, which is on the left. So they have that dome cranium, they have the small ears.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BLBen Lamm
They have a little bit of a hump structure. Um, you know, mammoths, because they had these massive, massive tusk, right? And, um, you know, you've talked to lots of folks in, in kind of the mammoth world. They actually, you know, moved their heads quite slowly, they had to, you know, they had to have this entire ridge of es- extra muscle in order to do that. But one of the things that's awesome also about the, uh, Asian elephants is some Asian elephants, uh, some of the ones that are born actually have... They look, they, they're not mammoth-like, but they have a lot of fur on them, and then they kind of lose it over time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Um, so are those the ones that you would find, like, in Thailand?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, yes. And, um, Thailand and then parts of, uh, uh, different parts of India, in the Indian subcontinent.
- JRJoe Rogan
I actually rode one of those once-
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... with my family.
- BLBen Lamm
Oh, did you go to th-
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't recommend it.
- BLBen Lamm
Did you go to one of those places that you, like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
... take care of them?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
And then...
- JRJoe Rogan
You, you have to, like, get a relationship with them.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you feed them sugarcane and you wash them-
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and you, you know, you play nice with them for, like, a while.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
For like a couple hours. It was, like, at least an hour. You're just hanging out with them-
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... petting them and, and then once they decide you're cool, they let you.
- BLBen Lamm
Then they'll let you hang. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They let you ride them.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah.
- 9:51 – 15:40
Museum basements, permafrost expeditions, and the ‘miracle pup’ thylacine genome
- BLBen Lamm
So, okay, so we have the ancient a- uh, ancient, uh, genomes that we have to collect and assemble.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BLBen Lamm
And that's... A lot of people just think of us in the lab, like just a bunch of people in the lab. But that's like some Indiana Jones shit. Like, we were literally going into the permafrost and, like, collecting dead samples from, uh, the permafrost which, you know, you've had, you know, John Reese on here, it's disgusting.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
It's, it smells like death. It literally... I mean, you're, it- I guess it is death. It's just over time piled up death. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you visited John?
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. Yeah, I've v- I visited John.
- JRJoe Rogan
You went to the boneyard?
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, I went to the boneyard.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's it like there?
- BLBen Lamm
It's, it's crazy. It's exactly what you'd expect. I, I didn't know John. Uh, so I'm on the board of trustees at the Explorers Club, so we take these expeditions. We did an expedition to Alaska to do mammoth retrieval, and then we're also doing some cultural, um, uh, studies with some of the indigenous people groups around mammoths. Like, "Do you want mammoths back? Is this a good idea," right? Because we try to be pretty inclusive. And, uh, they were like, "Oh, we got to meet the biggest landowner in Alaska, John." And I was like, "Okay, great. I'm excited." So I go meet him. We pull up, he's in a different car and he's like... And I think he wanted us to follow him. He's like, "Get in." I was like, "O- okay."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
And he's a big dude.
- JRJoe Rogan
He's enormous.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, I'm not that big of a dude, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, John's a giant.
- BLBen Lamm
Especially after, especially after Gary Breck has been working with me, I'm a smaller dude, right? And so, like, I literally, uh, uh, get in. I get in the car. There's a s- there's a bunch of stickers and there's one that has a- butterflies on it, uh, that says, "Give zero fucks." And I was like... And then there's, and he's like, "Just move the gun over." So I move the gun over and he goes, "Listen." And this is the first words out of his mouth to me. "If I stop short, you hand me that gun." And I was like... I didn't even ask a follow-up question 'cause like what do you do when you get in the car w- with John (laughs) and he says, "You hand me that gun. If I stop quick and I say hand me that gun, you hand me that gun." I was like, "That's awesome." And he showed me around the-
- JRJoe Rogan
What kind of gun was it?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, it was just some type of rifle. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
So it was just grizzlies?
- BLBen Lamm
I assume it was for grizzlies, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
Or bears or, you know, something large.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
But then he showed me around the boneyard and showed me his collection and he was completely... I mean, he didn't know us from anybody. He just opened up everything to us, right? And he's like, "Let me show you all this." Showed us his skull. He actually has a, a warehouse, I don't know if you...... ever discloses where it is. But he has a warehouse wh- where he has some of the greatest specimens ever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
So, it's cool. You should go, it's cool.
- JRJoe Rogan
I do want to go.
- BLBen Lamm
It's, it-
- JRJoe Rogan
He's an amazing guy. I love that guy.
- 15:40 – 19:36
Thylacine sightings, Papua New Guinea ‘singing dogs,’ and separating myth from data
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you buy into any of these sightings?
- BLBen Lamm
No. I did. So, Andrew Pask, for years, he's been working on it for 15 years. He's amazing, he's awesome. Uh, he's been working on, on like a shoestring budget, and that's part of the problem with de-extinction is nobody's put real capital into it until now. And he's been working on it for 15 years, and he's had people send him, you know, uh, poop, uh, uh, clippings from, you know, hair, and all this stuff over the years. They just send it to him, and then he loves the thylacine so much, he just sequences it, and he's like, "Nope, it's a dog. You sent me more dog shit. Thanks."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
I mean, it's l- it's, it's demoralizing. But, like, when I got into thylacine, you know, we met Andrew, we did a partnership with him. We actually made the largest investment in marsupial research, more than the Australian government. We made a, the largest investment in, in research for marsupial development of anyone. So we do this, um, and then you, you get into the myth of it, right? So you start reading it, right? You start reading, I start reading all the books on the thylacine. I want to be as, I get obsessive about projects. And so, I'm pretty obsessed about extinction right now. And so, got super deep in it, and, uh, then I started calling Pask. I was like, "Hey, I've been watching these YouTube videos, and I kind of think they're still there." And Pask is like, "No, no, stop it. Don't go down that rabbit hole." I, so I, I don't believe that they're there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, why did he say that?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, well, because he's been testing for the last 15 years all over Tasmania, right? So not just southern Australia, but all-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BLBen Lamm
... over Tasmania.
- JRJoe Rogan
So samples, poop and stuff like that?
- BLBen Lamm
Samples, just everything.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BLBen Lamm
Using camera traps. And nobody's s-... I, I think that they officially say that, uh, the thylacine went extinct in 1936.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
But probably into the late '40s and early '50s, they still existed. But, I mean, I think you, I think it's very unlikely that one still exists. It'd make our lives a lot easier if they existed.
- JRJoe Rogan
Forrest really believes in it.
- BLBen Lamm
He does. He thinks they're in Papua New Guinea.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
Because-
- JRJoe Rogan
Because of sightings?
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. He said he thinks in the western part of Papua New Guinea, in the mountains, uh, that-
- JRJoe Rogan
And also incredibly remote area.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Very difficult.
- BLBen Lamm
And, and, and the separation of that topography separates the, uh, Papua New Guinea, um, uh, singing dogs, which could be competitive for them for predator/prey, uh, from where the thylacine sightings were-
- JRJoe Rogan
What's a singing dog?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, it's, it's just another large canid that has a unique howl.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, wow.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
What does it sound like?
- BLBen Lamm
It, it still exists. Well, I, I mean, I, I'm sure Jamie can find the, a video of one.
- 19:36 – 21:49
Synthetic biology basics: bridging genome gaps with precision edits and phenotype targeting
- JRJoe Rogan
So, this is the question. If you have, say let's go to w- woolly mammoth.
- BLBen Lamm
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, if you have woolly mammoth and you have 99%, how do you bridge that gap?
- BLBen Lamm
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
How do you, how do you create-
- BLBen Lamm
That's synthetic biology. So, you never have to get to 100%. Right? You need to get to probably-
- JRJoe Rogan
Synthetic biology.
- BLBen Lamm
Synthetic biology. That's where you are using all of these different genetic tools, probably you've heard of CRISPR, all these other things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
Genetics, you know, which is ... It, it knockout, it breaks the DNA. It's not the- always the best tool. We can now actually make individual edits, uh, to ... When you think of the DNA double, you know, helix, right? In those rungs of the ladder?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
Those individuals are called nucleotides. We can change the letters. Like, that's how precise we can be. We can say, "At spot, you know, four million eight, I need to change that letter." And so, you change that letter. And then other times, you actually synthesize big blocks of DNA. So, when you notice that in the mammoth and in, in, in the, uh, Asian elephant there's a difference, and if it's in these certain like coat, protein coating regions, in all these different regions of the genome that drive phenotypes or physical like attributes, like you know, curved tusk, domed cranium, small ears, the subcutaneous fat layer, um, and uh, and then hair and, and coat color. You can actually then engineer that into the Asian elephant, right? 'Cause you're only looking ... You, you're only really looking at that 0.4% difference. Right? It's still a lot of numbers, but you're only looking at that. And so, the better you can be at software and the better you can be using AI and, and computer models, the less edits you have to make, right? 'Cause you're really just trying to target those core phenotypes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Are, are there specific genes that regulate size? 'Cause they're, they're larger than-
- BLBen Lamm
It's, it's a, it's a com- ... So, mammoths were about the same size. They're a little bit bigger than Asian elephants, a little bit smaller than African elephants.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, okay.
- BLBen Lamm
So, um, there were uh, 11, you know, everyone argues over the definition of speciation 'cause it's a stupid concept that humans made, not nature made. And so, there are 11 different types of mammoths out there that evolved in different, uh, in different ways and some of them were larger. But the woolly mammoth, the one that we're pursuing that has that woolly, uh, uh, phenotype, it was about the size of a Asian elephant.
- JRJoe Rogan
And-
- BLBen Lamm
But there ... To your question on size, it's actually a cluster of genes. We're finding more and more about how different genes also map across, uh, all species as well.
- 21:49 – 29:40
Woolly mice: multiplex edits, off-target screening, and public obsession
- JRJoe Rogan
And so, there's specific characteristics that these animals have, one of them being the big furry coats, that you guys ... What did you do with mice?
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs) We made woolly mice.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
See if you can find that.
- BLBen Lamm
The, the only, the only like unintended consequences was they were cute as fuck.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
Like, they ... People lost their minds, right? Like, we're ... There's, there's ... I was, I was on the phone recently with a, you know, moderately aggressive, um, journalist, and, uh, and it was going quite poorly (laughs) as some calls go.
- JRJoe Rogan
Moderately aggressive?
- BLBen Lamm
Mod-
- JRJoe Rogan
They were being aggressive in what way?
- BLBen Lamm
They-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, "Why are you doing this?"
- BLBen Lamm
Some people, some people ... Yeah, they, they ... Everyone likes to fight.
- JRJoe Rogan
Look how cute!
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
My daughter actually found this online and wants one.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. So, we get that a lot from, from kids.
- JRJoe Rogan
She wants a woolly mouse. (laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
So, every week, every week ... Um, I don't have my laptop. I should probably bring it down here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Look how cute.
- BLBen Lamm
But every week-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, my God. They're adorable.
- BLBen Lamm
So, this ... So, these woolly mice aren't just adorable. We basically said, "Look, what are the core genes that drive the hair phenotype or physical attribute of a, of a mammoth, um, from an Asian elephant to a mammoth?" And then because we wanna do this in the most ethical way as possible, there's about 200 million years of genetic divergence between mice and elephants, we didn't just wanna ram mammoth DNA in there and see what happens. So, we looked for the mouse equivalent, right? So, we look for ... Like, all of us have similar genes, so we can try to look for those genes and then edit those genes with the data we got from the mammoth so that we're then not just putting random genes in there that could either hurt the animal or kill them, right, or that may not even be compatible with life, right? So, we try to be really, really thoughtful about ... And the, the woolly mice, um, went like ... It, it went insane. There's people that are like making t-shirt ... There's a meme coin.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, and so we, we made 36 mice. They're all, they're all healthy. There's 36 mice that we made.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BLBen Lamm
Um, and what was crazy about it is ... We're excited about it because it shows that the end-to-end process of taking data from an ancient ge- uh, DNA, comparing it to a living animal, making those changes, doing it with 100% efficiency, and that's really important and really hard. So, we did it with 100% efficiency. Yeah, that, that's the, that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Look at the difference.
- BLBen Lamm
Well, so the, the mouse-
- 29:40 – 44:43
Why dire wolves: indigenous partnerships, wolf conservation, and finding usable dire wolf DNA
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay. Um, so how did you make the decision to do what you ultimately did, what you showed me before the show?
- BLBen Lamm
Um, so, uh, we're working on the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo for different reasons. We work with a lot of different private landowners, governments, and indigenous people groups. And, uh, a project that we announced, uh, through our Colossal Foundation, uh, about two and a half years ago is, uh, doing a population genomics map. We talked about bio-banking a little bit. So what we want to understand from the bison that are still here in America, what's genetic diversity? What's been lost, you know? H- what's the number of inbreeding? So we go through this whole process to try to understand, and then we were giving a report back to MHA Nation, Chairman Fox. It's one of the largest, uh, indigenous people groups in the United States, one of the largest tribes based in North Dakota. So we're giving them a report out on this. We, we, we went to their nation, wanted to share this. And, and then, you know, we're curious, so we said, "What other projects would you work on if, if that you, that we could do that's helpful outside of helping bison?" And they said that they, that we needed to help with wolf conservation, and they brought up that. They said that we needed to help with more bison conservation. Uh, they said if we could do stuff around, um, uh, eagles and fish. And so, we kind of got that feedback. And when, um, Chairman Fox was walking me through their, their herital- their, uh, Cultural Heritage Museum, he actually stopped on this incredible picture of, of a white wolf. And he said, "You know, that's the great wolf." And, uh, and he talked about the ancestral knowledge that was passed down and that's been lost, and how many people believed, um, uh, that it could've even been a dire wolf. And I was like, "From Game of Thrones? That's cool. I love the show. That's interesting."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
So we did that. We, we talked about that. Um, and then, you know, three months later, I was in North Carolina, and, uh, understanding that, uh, uh, for a completely different meeting around financing. And in that meeting, it, the Red Wolf Program came up. I don't know if you know anything about the red wolf.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
But it's kind of a disaster.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
You know, it's the only endemic wolf to Amer- that's only endemic to America. It's a red wolf. Uh, it's beautiful. And, uh, there's like 15 left in the wild.... it would- with massive loss of, of genetic diversity, massive bottleneck. And, uh, and I was like, "Wait, we're supposed to be this country of innovation? We can't save our own..." When you think of, like, the American West, right, you think of wolves, you think of, like, uh, you know, eagles soaring, you think of, like, trout- bears catching trout, you, you know, you think of bison. The thought that we could lose one of these amazing icons, like... Uh, we were like, "We have to do something about this."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
"We have to figure something out." So, we, we put that kind of on the list, and then in a weird series of events, we've had all of these kids over the last three years sen- and teachers sen- and parents sending us pictures of woolly mammoths, or dodos, or .......................... Like, we get, like, s- boxes of this every single week, which is pretty cool. So, we're gonna make a Colossal Kids Corner, um, at our new, new, uh, labs. And, and in that, we've had all this, some Hollywood talent, like, you know, Tom Brady, others that have invested in the business. They're just excited about it. Most of them learned about it through their kids-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
... kind of like with the woolly mouse with you. And so everyone's excited about it. And then, um, we talked again to MHA Nation. They brought up the dire wolf again. And so we thought maybe there was an opportunity to bring back an American species 'cause dire wolves were only found in, in the US, uh, little, uh, in, in North America, but predominantly in the United States, uh, uh, uh, coastal United States. And, um, we thought if we could do something that could bring back the dire wolf, also, uh, help wolf conservation and bring people from, like, sci-fi, fantasy, and kids more into science and into the conversation around conservation, we thought it was a cool idea, but we had no idea if we could pull it off.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there dead dire wolves that were trapped in permafrost or is-
- BLBen Lamm
No. Most are... Most of the dire wolf skulls out there, uh, there's thousands of them in La Brea Tar Pits. So, if you go there-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- BLBen Lamm
... they have this beautiful wall, but because of heat and aci- acid- acidification, there isn't anything that's protected. Like, there's nothing you can get from that. But, uh, uh, about six years ago, uh, a group, including Beth Shapiro, our chief science officer, uh, sequenced a tooth that was found in a cave, just a single tooth, right? And in that tooth, they actually found a, uh, uh... They actually got 0.15X or coverage of the genome, so they got about 15% of the genome. But that's not really enough. You need to get up to about 10X, meaning that you can read the entire genome about 10 different times so that even if there are gaps, you understuff- understand enough of the core kind of, uh, coding regions that you could bring back that animal. Or-
- JRJoe Rogan
Is this done by AI? Is this done by programs?
- BLBen Lamm
It's done by AI and software, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
So, we, we built, um... Part of our business model is building technologies, uh, to solve these really complicated problems that are much harder to solve than, you know, just solving them for, you know, existing species. Open-sourcing that for conservation for free, but then also taking those technologies that we can monetize for humans and spinning them out. So, our first, uh, computational analysis company was called Form Bio, and we actually spun it out of the business.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, you have this tooth. You have 1.5.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, uh, 1.5, so 15% of the genome.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BLBen Lamm
Um, and so I went to Beth, who was only an advisor at the time, and said, "Could you re-sample the tooth?" And she's like, "It, it's like, you know, half an inch long." She's like, "It's destructive sampling. Like, it's going to ruin us." Well, could we scour the other museums and see if it's even possible? So, we, we lucked out and that tooth's 13,000 years old. The skull itself is, uh, 72, 73,000 years old. Not exactly sure. Uh, but it was found in a riverbed, um, and it wasn't found in, uh, a riverbed at the mouth of a cave. So, it wasn't found, like, in, in, uh, the permafrost. It also wasn't found in, like, heat and acid- aci- acidification. So, uh, there's a bone in all of us called the petrous bone, which is insanely dense, and it doesn't change a lot from after you're born. It's a great DNA storage. Better than teeth, better than anything.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where is it?
- BLBen Lamm
It's on the... It's, like, s- in the inner ear kind of head area.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BLBen Lamm
And so, um, we got permission from the museum to, uh, very carefully, uh, drill into the back, the underside of the skull, and remove, uh, the petrous bone to see if we could get DNA. And we got really lucky. Between re-sampling the first and, um, the in- in the skull, we ended up getting about 13 to 14X coverage, so that's more than we needed to potentially bring back the dire wolves.
- JRJoe Rogan
And then what'd you do?
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs) Well, and then...
- 44:43 – 1:06:30
‘You made a dire wolf’: revealing Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi and how they’re raised
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, so this is what ... We'll just get to it. You made a fucking dire wolf.
- BLBen Lamm
(laughs) I didn't. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
You guys.
- BLBen Lamm
Our, our team, uh, our incredible team, uh, uh, made, uh, three dire wolves so far.
- JRJoe Rogan
Let's see the photos. Jamie, bust out some photos. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself, because this is truly fucking crazy.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's the pup.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah. So this is, uh ... So that's actually, uh, Romulus as ... So, we have two boys, Romulus and Remus, uh, founders of Roam, and then, uh, and then we have Khaleesi, who's the new girl.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
So, this is Romulus and Remus. Uh, so funny, funny story about this. So, Peter Jackson, uh, from Lord of the Rings, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Jamie.
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, s- uh, Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings, uh, was actually, uh, one of our investors, and he has this huge museum in Wellington that he's building for all these movie props. And he's like ... We were ... I was sitting in, in Peter's, uh, house with ... He and his, he and his partner Fran, and I was like, "You know," um, uh ... I showed him the video of them howling. He started tearing up and he goes, "This is the first time I've heard a dire wolf, or anyone's heard a dire wolf in 10,000 years." He started ... Well, he like, he like physically, emotionally got chills and started crying. And then he's like, "Well, you know I do have the throne." I was like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "I bought the throne last week at auction." It was at, at a, at a private auction from like Sotheby's or someone, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BLBen Lamm
And so, so he did, and it just happened to be where the wolves were doing their vet checkup. Like, talk about cosmic coincidence. Incredible, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BLBen Lamm
And so, um, you know, what you don't see in this photo is you don't see the fact that we have American Humane Society there with three veterinary people. We had six people from our, uh, uh, animal care team.
- JRJoe Rogan
When you say checkup, you don't vaccinate these little guys, do you?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, they do get ... They ... Because of viruses from that ... they can get from the soil, uh, at s- uh, eight, at eight weeks, they do get basic virus. Uh, they do, they do get basic vaccines.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, were you concerned about that? I mean, you have this animal that you're just-
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, so these are staying on ... You know, like these are not going back into the wild, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, not yet.
- BLBen Lamm
N- ye- n- Right now, they're on a 2,000 acre, uh, secure, expansive ecological preserve with 24/7 care. We have, we have an animal hospital that we built.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, people are always like, "You guys raise so much money." And I was like, "Well, it ... The ... Because we didn't just spend it on the labs. You have to spend it on the animal care, the facilities, and whatnot."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Let's see-
- BLBen Lamm
We have-
- JRJoe Rogan
... the photo of the, the actual grown ones, because they're fucking nuts. Um, yeah.
- BLBen Lamm
Yeah, so, so this is, uh, Romulus and Remus, uh, in ... Playing in the snow on the preserve when they are, um, uh, three months old. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
So three months, how big are they?
- BLBen Lamm
Uh, three months, they were north of 45 pounds.
Episode duration: 2:57:34
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